Fat Pigeons

Dear Bill

Everyone I know adores Has Been. Is there any chance that you could take it on tour? I, and many other people that I know, would gladly pay good money to hear your inimitable vocal stylings live.

Also, while walking home tonight I could not get your rendition of “Just the Way You Are” out of my head, despite the fact that you have never recorded it.

I honestly fear that if you were to actually sing this song, the world would end, as God’s purpose for the Earth would have been fulfilled.

It may be worth it.

Piers

Another draft of Persephone put in the metaphorical drawer, and it’s time to start writing my second feature.

Same rules as before: two months to commit a first draft to paper and never mind the quality, feel the width. I’m facing off against William and Christine, who will keep me honest.

I highly recommend having a competition with someone, if you’re having problems getting motivated. Anyone that doesn’t complete their screenplay on time gets mercilessly teased. It’s just like going to a screenwriting class, only it doesn’t cost you any money.

As a change from tentacle-based Horror, I’ve decided to do a UK Heist Movie. Or possibly a Caper, it’s difficult to be sure at this point.

Basic concept down, it’s time to move to the corkboard.

I discovered the joys of the corkboard about three years ago. To those who haven’t experienced its awesome power, give it a try. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much easier it makes your life.

You will require:

– A large corkboard (one)
– 3″x5″ index cards (lots)
– A wall to hang the board on (one)
– Drawing pins (lots)

First, hang the corkboard on a wall in an area of your house where you pass by every day. I like to keep it out of my work area, say in the living room. That way it’s always in my periphery, churning away in the subconscious.

Got a scene, or a moment, or a fragment of dialogue? Scribble it down on an index card, and pin it to the board. It doesn’t matter where.

Every time you think of a scene, stick it on the board. The fact that you’re pinning it onto a board soon makes it a sequence. And that suggests other scenes, and other sequences.

The joy of the corkboard is that it’s easy to change. You’ve not committed anything to paper. Just a quick scribble on an index card – the work of a moment to replace. And because it’s easy to change, you’re not precious about it.

There’s no “I can’t lose that, I spent days working on it and it’s my favourite scene.” It can’t be. It’s just a scribble on a piece of card. Ten seconds to write a new one.

Tops.

So the corkboard allows you to rapidly improve your work by trying things out and discarding them. If a sequence doesn’t work, you just pull the cards out and move them about. Scenes can move from the middle to the front to the end of the story at will, split into two or combine into one. Or be thrown away entirely – on my Enterprise spec I went through three completely different A-stories before I found one that worked.

You want to be moving cards around as much as possible. Try it different ways. You can always move the cards back.

How many cards do you need? Well if you’re working on a TV spec, get a hold of a couple of scripts for the show you’re speccing and count the scenes. Then just duplicate that.

For a film, somewhere between 40-60 scenes is about right. I tend to write short scenes, so I like to have around sixty cards on the board. For Persephone, sixty cards worked out at about a hundred and five pages.

When you’ve got the basics of the story worked out and inspiration is starting to run thin, you can set your left-brain to work.

Scribble a little A/B/C in the corner of each card, depending on whether the scene advances the A-story, B-story, and so on. Is there a chunk where only one story’s moving? Add some thematic tension or irony by introducing a scene from a different story to counterpoint. Add or discard subplots at will.

Get some coloured pencils or crayons, and assign a colour to each character. Now put a little square of colour in the corner of every card that character appears in.

Now you’ve got a visual cue to see what everyone’s doing when. Characters only appearing towards the end of the film. Characters who disappear half way through. If you need to cut away to a different scene, it’s easy to see who hasn’t been around lately.

What you can see, you can fix.

The corkboard makes the structure of your film easy to see.

And that makes it easy to fix.

It had to happen.

The Snakes On A Plane Role-playing Game.

“The snakes are always released at the midpoint of a trans-oceanic flight. This is a necessary rule, as otherwise the pilot could just land the plane and get rid of the snakes.”

Bill Martell has a blog.

Eighteen of the films he’s written have been produced. Not just sold, mind, actually committed to celluloid.

He knows whereof he speaks.

Go visit.

I’ve just finished a short contract working out in Slough.

I was amused to read the following posted on the toilet door:
“Please leave these toilets as you would wish to find them.”

As the title of this post attests, I was unable to help.

BBC4 recently aired a new version of “A for Andromeda”, originally shown as seven 45-minute episodes back in 1961. Not much of the original series survives, so as with their recent production of “The Quatermass Experiment” the BBC has updated and re-made the production.

Sadly, “A for Andromeda” wasn’t transmitted live. One of the most wonderful things about the new Quatermass was seeing how actors cope knowing that if they fluff a line they can’t simply re-do it. About the only time you see that nowadays is at the theatre, so it’s always nice to see people acting without a safety net.

Quatermass was rendered especially challenging by the fact that the pope died half-way through. A little ticker came up at the bottom of the screen saying “Major Breaking News on BBC1 now”. In my house we thought, fuck it, a giant plant-monster eating Tate Modern has to be more fun than people droning on about a dead white guy.

I like to imagine the whispers flowing through the set as those actors not on screen were filled in by their friends and colleagues. Did it put them off? How many of them were Catholic?

Back to Andromeda.

The new version was filleted to ninety minutes. Most of the story still made sense, though there was one moment where a couple of characters managed to somehow figure out that someone had been a) murdered and b) selling secrets to the US despite the lack of any evidence or information.

So what was good about it?

Mainly the fact that it was cheap, good, ideas-led science fiction. A riposte to the concept that SF can’t be entertaining without being filled with the latest CGI wizardry. A proof-of-concept that an audience is willing to engage with big concepts without enormous explosions to sweeten the pill.

BBC4 have proved that there’s an audience for tightly written genre pieces, and that it doesn’t have to be all about the effects.

Outside my house is a burned-out car, which was quite surprising. It appeared overnight, and I found it while walking to the newsagent in the morning. Apparently my housemate got to see them putting it out on her way into work, which was exciting.

Surprising, because you don’t often see cars set alight in the middle of London, but the sight of a burned out car and that particular aroma of burned rubber, petrol and oil did bring back memories.

It reminded me of where I was brought up, and why I left.

Ever wanted to know exactly how the budget for a 71-million-dollar movie is spent?

The Smoking Gun has the answers as it publishes the full budget breakdown from “The Village”, and edited highlights of the spend on M. Night Shyamalan’s other films.

When I was a young boy, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, and my great aunt. Mum and Dad both worked, so my brother and myself were looked after by Nanna, Poppa and Auntie Ann quite a lot of the time.

They put you in a big white sheet,
and tuck the corners in nice and neat.
Oh-oh-oh-oh, where will we be in a hundred years from now?

Auntie Ann would sometimes sing me a song. About how the world was evanescent and fleeting, and how in the end all things must die. This isn’t the song that any parent would sing to their children. There are some truths that are told by others.

They put you in a big brown box,
and cover you under six feet of rocks.
Oh-oh-oh-oh, where will we be in a hundred years from now?

Last night over dinner I was telling my girlfriend about this. She’s from Texas. It turns out that it was sung in the playground there when she was growing up; she was taught it by her schoolmates.

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out,
they crawl in thin and they crawl out stout.
Oh-oh-oh-oh, where will we be in a hundred years from now?

And children across the world will be singing this song to each other long after I’m gone to dust. Because there are some songs that you can’t be sung by your parents, but that have to be learned by us all.